


Nameless

by 100demons



Category: Naruto
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-11
Updated: 2015-06-11
Packaged: 2018-04-03 21:31:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4115578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/100demons/pseuds/100demons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five truths and a lie about Yamato.</p><blockquote>
  <p>He leaves his old name behind, by the still burning ashes.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	Nameless

_one_

When he’s twelve, he comes back to an empty house and a headstone with his mother’s name engraved on it, the kanji long worn by the passage of time.

His room has been left exactly as it was, before he was taken. The clock is frozen at 7:45, the sheets of his small, child sized bed still rumpled. There are holes in the edges, eaten away by the fire moths. 

It takes him eight minutes and twenty two seconds to tear the house apart and grow a small grove of trees in its place and the entire time, he can’t help but think of Orochimaru’s satisfaction in a tool well-made.

It takes him five seconds to set the trees ablaze.

He leaves his old name behind, by the still burning ashes.

_two_

The Sandaime rescues fifteen still-living human subjects; six months later, there are only three left still sane enough to carry out a conversation.

The Hokage pulls out a chair, his chakra coiled within his fragile bones like a banked coal fire. He places a kunai down on the table and gives them a choice.

He and Anko both reach for the blade at the same time, cutting themselves on the sharp edge. Only Anko’s blood drips down onto the table, his own cut healing over too quickly. He has to press the knife against his palm over and over again, speaking the words of fealty quickly, awkwardly, tongue stumbling over the long words. 

Miko shakes her bandaged head, once, and leaves the village.

She still sends him a card every year for his birthday.

 _three_

He and Anko are placed on a genin team together, rounded out by a genin who had been left behind when her former teammates made chuunin ahead of her. Three hours after being assigned together, she quits and decides to transfer to a clerical job. The two of them enter in the Chuunin Exams anyway, with no jounin-sensei and no third teammate, relying on the Hokage’s guilt and the village’s dire need for ninja to let them through. 

Midway through the Forest of Death, the stabilizer on Anko’s cursed seal shatters. Six genin end up injured or dead before he manages to wrap a cocoon of wood around her screaming body. 

They have to call the Yellow Flash back from the front lines to carve his seals onto Anko’s writhing body. He works throughout the day and the night, trailing blood and ink through the hospital corridors while he paces and thinks, a thin masked shadow lurking at his heels, cloaked in steel and darkness. 

He holds onto Anko’s hand the entire time. 

In the end, the Hokage slips them both their flak vests, without fanfare or ceremony, and sends them off to war.

 _four_

When he’s sixteen, he spends two months as a paid bodyguard in a lordling’s castle in the rolling countryside surrounding the capital of Fire Country. He spends the time falling in and out of beds and haylofts, drawn in by the kitchen maids, the skinny page boys, the warmth found in the curl of another body around his. 

They gasp in delight every time he conjures up a flower in hand, knowing nothing of the legacy of Senju blood beyond the spiral leaf he bears on his brow. He uses half a hundred different names, memorizing the way they sound during sex, breathy and gasping, soft and tender, each one a small gift given freely.

When he returns to Konoha, there’s a message waiting for him by his window, borne by a black-winged bird marked by the Hokage’s seal.

Along with the bone and blacks of ANBU, he takes on a new name, to go with the sword in his hand and the mask pressed against his face. Anko sends him a bright pink congratulatory cake, sloppily iced in black. There’s a vivid caricature of a penis on it, with very small balls, and underneath it is the hiragana for Tenzou. There are six exclamation points. 

He scrapes off the icing, cuts it into slices, and feeds it to the cat lounging outside his apartment door. He waits a day to make sure it doesn’t die, then eats the rest for dinner. 

It takes like sand and salt and he eats every bite. 

_five_

When he’s twenty eight, he receives notice of his official medical discharge, wrapped up in long words and seals and a medal of honor for serving in the war. 

(“Yes, that’s right, let’s award this poor asshole for accidentally fueling the entire fucking zombie army that’s responsible for killing, oh I don’t know, half the entire ninja population of the world?”

“Captain Yamato, or Tenzou, or whatever. We just wanted to thank you and honor your sacrifice. All of the Kabuto and Orochimaru stuff. It-- it wasn’t your fault,” Naruto says, his blue eyes wide and pleading. 

“I know,” he says tiredly, burying his face in his hands. “It never seems to be, and yet.”)

He packs up his flat, places the keys in an envelope and mails it to Anko. He puts out one last can of tuna for the stray cat, slings his old tattered bag over his shoulder and walks through the village gates for the last time.

_one lie_

He doesn’t look back.


End file.
